National CPS News Archive

National News Coverage

For years, Tarkiyah Melton dreamed of owning a home, a place she could be proud of, a place where her two children could attend good schools. But for years the dream seemed out of reach. Not only had Melton spent more than half her life in foster care...

Thanks to the Metropolitan Atlanta Youth Opportunities Initiative, a program of the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta and other partners, Melton's dreams are being realized. She was able to save nearly $3,000 for a down payment on a Sandy Springs townhome, and the initiative matched her savings dollar for dollar up to $1,000.

Child abduction for ritual killings is on the rise in the Nigerian city of Kano, say officials and advocacy groups who blame the trend on greed for political power and quick wealth.

Body parts from toddlers and pre-schoolers are prized ingredients for lucky charms thought to make people rich or rise up on the political ladder. In the last few months, kidnapping of young children has increased in Kano.

... with a domestic problem, unless your intention is for potentially fatal harm to come to you or the relative with whom you're having trouble.

A 14-year-old girl from Tucumcari, New Mexico wound up in the hospital with a Taser dart embedded in her skull after her mother, Stacy Akin, took her to the police department because the two of them had been fighting, reports the Portales News-Tribune.

The Obama administration is renewing efforts to sign a United Nations treaty supposedly aimed at protecting children's rights. New rights granted the child would include the right to "thought, conscience and religion."

While a treaty codifying children's rights may sound harmless, the true nature of this treaty is devastating to our family structure, Constitution, national sovereignty and security. Do our children not already enjoy these rights? Our nation is already party to the treaty's two optional protocols: one preventing Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, the other preventing Children in Armed Conflict.

Remember the Duke Rape case? In that case, a group of rowdy jocks from the school's lacrosse team were accused of raping a black prostitute.

Now a new Duke University rape story has arisen. You probably haven't heard much about this one. The associate director of the Center for Health Policy has been arrested and charged with allegedly offering, over the Internet, to have an out-of-state traveler sexually molest his adopted 5-year-old son.

The mother in a controversial Winnipeg custody trial, involving a girl who was sent to school with white supremacist symbols drawn on her skin, has been arrested for alleged fraudulent use of a credit card.

The news came just as the custody hearing was set to resume with lawyers for Child and Family Services wrapping up their case. The custody case has garnered international attention and sparked debate over how far parents can go to instill beliefs in their children - and how far the government should go to protect children from those beliefs.

This is a step in the right direction because this new settlement puts a new emphasis on the most important change Baltimore needs to make: Doing more to keep children out of foster care in the first place.

Most parents who lose their children to foster care are nothing like those whose cases, rightly, make headlines. And in typical cases, extensive research shows that children left in their own homes do better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. That does not mean no child ever should be taken from her or his parents.

Teenage girls with a history of delinquency who were placed in individualized foster care programs were less likely than their peers to become pregnant, according to a study in the June issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

Teen girls in foster care have an elevated risk for pregnancy, according to HealthDay/Forbes. For example, an earlier survey of teens in three states found that nearly half of girls in the foster care system reported a pregnancy by age 19, according to David Kerr, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University and lead author of the new study.

Nationwide, the number of children torn from their parents each year has soared 50 percent since 1996.

In Indiana, removals have jumped 60 percent just since 1999; but that hasn't curbed child abuse tragedies. The take-the-child-and-run mentality in Kentucky has led to scathing reports from an inspector general and a grand jury about families needlessly destroyed.

Outspoken Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann says she's so worried that information from next year's national census will be abused that she will refuse to fill out anything more than the number of people in her household.

"I know for my family the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home," she said. "We won't be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn't require any information beyond that."

The summers of my youth were filled with the kinds of activities that were common to every kid in the 80s but are considered almost death-defying these days: tree climbing, bike riding without a helmet, and daylong road trips...

I have almost no memories of my father. Instead I remember Mike Fieseler. He was a former industrial-arts teacher whom my mother dated off and on for much of my childhood. Jason and I weren't his biggest fans.

It is hard to explain the poverty in which I grew up while in foster care. There was little food and my clothes were rags. I remember seeing a picture of a toothbrush in a magazine and thinking that somebody must be very rich to afford one.

Their house had no gas or electricity, but was heated using the firewood we collected from hedges. My new father seldom had work, and when he did have money he spent it at the pub. Somehow our poverty seemed to go unnoticed among our neighbours.

Of the approximately 500,000 American youth in foster care, Native American kids are faring among the worst, according to youth advocacy and policy experts.

New analysis indicates that American Indian, Hispanic and African-American children all fare more poorly than white children in foster care - with Native youth being about three times more likely to be placed in foster care than all children nationally.

On Friday, Madonna won a Malawi higher court appeal to adopt a three-year-old girl, the second child she is adopting from that country.

The child's father, James Kambewa, is disputing the adoption, claiming his poverty is impeding justice. A lower court had earlier denied the adoption, citing that Madonna had failed a residency requirement. Madonna is the most recent of celebrity parents adopting internationally...

Rachel Pullen is the 24 year old single mother to "Baby K". She has been fighting the Family Courts in Nottingham (UK) for nearly 3 years in an attempt to regain custody of her daughter; now she's about to take her case to the European Court of Human Righ

Baby K was born prematurely 3 years ago. She had numerous medical problems and required surgery and an extended hospital stay. Social workers first voiced concerns that Rachel was not visiting her daughter in the hospital frequently enough. When Baby K was released from the hospital, she was placed directly in foster care...

An expert panel for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the marketing of three psychotropic medications for use by mentally disturbed youth.

The Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee said this month that it supports a request by the manufacturers of Zyprexa, Seroquel and Geodon to market the drugs as effective and acceptably safe for treatment of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia among youth.

Ever since the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was adopted and opened to nations across the world for ratification in 1989, HSLDA has been concerned about the implications of this treaty for U.S. homeschoolers.

We have consistently warned that this treaty could be the vehicle opponents of home education could use to effectively ban or severely regulate homeschooling. On February 16, 1995, when Secretary of State Madeline Albright signed the UNCRC, the United States took a major step along the path to ratification which would make the UNCRC, as stated in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land.

When Alberta legislators voted in favour of the amendment to the Human Rights Code enshrined in Bill 44 they took a risk.

This bill will enshrine the right of parents to remove their children from classes that deal with subject matter related to sexuality, religion and sexual orientation. Though this right is already guaranteed under the Alberta Education Act, the move is a symbolic one, recognizing that these rights are basic human rights.

Mentions of being paddled at school or having a corporal punishment policy tend to conjure up mental images of one room school-houses and boys in suspenders who were caught putting a frog in the lunch pail of a little girl with pigtails.

In fact, many parents are confounded to find out that their state actually allows children in public schools to be spanked by teachers and administrators. While Illinois has outlawed corporal punishment since 1993, there are still 22 states that still permit paddling, with only three have laws that restrict that use (AZ, OH, UT).

Home schooling parents risk being hounded by the authorities as the Government conducts its third review of home education in four years, a Conservative MP said yesterday.

The review is being conducted by Graham Badman, who also investigated the Baby P child abuse scandal. A report is expected in the next few weeks. The review is looking at whether home education is being used as a cover for child abuse, a suggestion which has angered home schooling parents.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is giving $500,000 to Western Michigan University to help ex-foster children survive the rigors of college.

The Kalamazoo school says the five-year grant "will help boost the college success rate of former foster care youth." The school says it planned to accommodate 15 to 20 students but says the program has attracted more than 50.

Oahu Family Court Judge Michael Broderick says he is convinced methamphetamine addiction is the greatest issue facing Hawaii because of the health, economic and social consequences.

Meth use dominates every court calendar he has, including paternity, domestic abuse and Child Protective Services, said the lead judge of the Special Division. Eight out of 10 Child Protective Services cases are drug-related, mostly to ice, he said. He has about 50 domestic abuse cases a week, and 25 percent involve ice, he said.

A new report drawing stark conclusions about the risk of abuse towards Maori children has been described as shocking by Maori children's advocate, Dr Hone Kaa.

The report, Death and Serious Injury from Assault of Children under five years in Aotearoa New Zealand, was commissioned by the Office of the Children's Commissioner and reviewed risk factors for death and injury from abuse in New Zealand and worldwide.

An Edmonton foster mother convicted of manslaughter in the death of a child in her care was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison.

A jury convicted the woman, 34, in November. She cannot be named under Alberta child protection legislation in order to protect the identity of the child, who also cannot be named. The toddler died in January 2007 of a massive brain injury sustained when his skull hit part of a toilet bowl.